(which are superior to older tools like pkg_{install,delete,update,upgrade} etc...)

But they haven't entirely ditched ports. Instead, they made a repository tool (poudriere) that makes building custom repositories child's play. This tool of course revolves around ports.

Poudriere uses a combination of ports and jails (VMs) to build and package applications and places them into a folder that is immediately ready to be served over NFS or HTTP and accessed with pkg. It's very easy to configure, the tool will actually download a FreeBSD image, sync the ports tree and build ports into packages with your own specified compile-time options (if any).

That's remarkably easy! (EDIT: There's no need to build the kernel and world now)

It's certainly an improvement in practicality. FreeBSD can now probably be setup and configured in a comparable amount of time as any Linux distribution minus the pre-installed components (FreeBSD is not pre-installed with anything).

Anyway, if you ever cared to try something like FreeBSD, wait another a month for FreeBSD 10 to be released and give it a spin. It should be orders of magnitude easier and less time consuming to setup.

Except it takes an hour or two to compile big projects like Firefox with a powerful machine. Ports is practical with small and self-contained applications though.

I have a netbook for casual surfing and that runs FreeBSD for obvious reasons (namely Windows 7 is unbearably slow on this type of system). Ports is even worse there (it takes several hours to compile Firefox).

I got into poudriere because the netbook needs a recent version of the Intel X11 driver which requires KMS to be enabled. However, the official FreeBSD package repository for 9.x is compiled with KMS disabled ... hence I had to create my own mini KMS repository.

By the way, if you want to try poudriere for pkgng on FreeBSD 9.x, you'll need to add